Book Review: Graham Mytton,Peter Diem and Piet Hien van Dam,Media Audience Research: A Guide for Professionals

With the growing influence of media (social media platforms) on the modern societies, the academic research in the field of media audience research is gaining momentum. Audience research facilitates the media producers, broadcasters and advertisers in understanding the potential audience’s demographics and psychographics for designing their media strategy.

The book by Mytton, Diem and van Dam is a description of the contemporary methods of audience research available to media research scholars and practitioners. The book covers both quantitative (survey design) and qualitative (focus group) methods of media research. The beginning part of the book (Chapters 1–2) explores the need and evolution of research in the field of media. The middle part (Chapters 3–7) outlines the merits and demerits of traditional data collection techniques including structured questionnaires and interviews for media audience research. The role of passive data collection methods (Internet and mobile-based technologies such as metering) for measuring audience behaviour is also explored in these chapters. The last few chapters describe some data collection tools and available databases for audience research.

Though the book covers the broad set of active or passive methods/tools available for audience data collection (Chapters 4, 5 and 7), it does not include an in-depth coverage of analysis tools available for analyzing the vast audience data. Chapter 6 of the book describes some of the text analysis software, such as word cloud and web mining for analyzing text data; however, the description is limited to names and URL addresses for download. Application of these methods in the form of caselets or examples (Chapter 10 demonstrates hypothetical examples of audience rating calculations) would have added value to the readers of the book.

On the whole, with limited academic publications in the field of media audience research, the book provides a valuable reference for practitioners and research scholars in this field.